Keynotes

Gabi Zodik

IBM Research – Haifa, Israel

Gabi Zodik is the Mobile First Research Global Leader, as well as the Department Group Manager of the IBM Haifa Research Lab Mobile and Industry Solutions Dept. He oversees the lab’s research and development efforts in Mobile, Space Time Services, Wearables, IoT, System Engineering, and emerging Cloud Computing platforms. In his MobileFirst global role, Gabi oversees all the research activities in Mobile. Mobile technologies are revolutionizing our personal lives and transforming the way we do business. MobileFirst technologies from IBM are helping enable this transformation in businesses, whether internally for business processes or externally for customer facing systems using front office digitization. The large variety of heterogeneous platforms is one of the many challenges associated with developing and managing mobile applications. IBM Research is investigating all these hurdles and address the entire application lifecycle. These innovations include: tools for mobile application creation for non-programmers, advanced runtime services such as location and data synchronization for omni channel services, advanced testing services, security analysis and certification, and application usage analytics. These capabilities support both hybrid and native application development. He also serves as the relationship manager for IBM MobileFirst, and Rational with Research. He has an M.Sc. and B.Sc. in electrical engineering from the Technion, and an MBA from the University of Haifa.

Future technologies supporting the convergence of Mobile, Wearables, and IoT

The next wave in computing is the convergence of Mobile, Wearables, & IoT. This talk presents technologies from IBM Research enabling this transformation, and give use-cases from various industries: 1) describe integration technologies for tying together mobile devices, wearables, sensors, and cloud, as well as equipping mobile devices with the ability to sense and control the physical environment; 2) illustrate new analytic models for leveraging the vast amounts of data generated, off-line and in real-time, to optimize processes; 3) address privacy requirements by allowing users control over their information; and (4) show new tools for building, securing, and optimizing the applications that run across this heterogeneous infrastructure. In addition we shall take a peek into, the next wave in computing that will need to exploit data and computing at the edge of the network. For example, contextual programming is emerging as the next significant change in way we develop Mobile apps, where real-time pro-active decisions are made based upon the mobile context (e.g., location, time of day, current user task) of a specific user or group of users. To meet the needs of such use-cases, a new paradigm, which we call Adhoc computing, is emerging. This paradigm needs to deal with massive amounts of devices, sensors, and data, both at the edge and in business systems, and must be able to react context in close to real-time. Furthermore, it must handle the heterogeneity in devices/OSs, as well as the lack of reliability, security and/or trust of these devices, and must be able to learn and improve over time. In this collaborative session, we give vertical industry and cross-industry use-cases, and describe IBM technologies and solutions for this new class of computing.

Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman

Carnegie Mellon University – Silicon Valley, USA

Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman is Professor of Software Management Practice at Carnegie Mellon University – Silicon Valley, and the Executive Director of its Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI). Earlier in his career, Tony was Professor of Medical Information Science at the University of California, San Francisco, and concurrently served as a Lecturer in the Computer Science Division at the University of California, Berkeley. Tony is best known as the Founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), which built the innovative Software through Pictures (StP) multiuser modeling environment. IDE was one of the first companies to include open source software in a commercial software product. In 2000, Tony became VP of Bluestone Software (later acquired by Hewlett-Packard), responsible for its West Coast Labs, where he led the creation of the award-winning open source Total-e-Mobile toolkit for building mobile web apps.
Tony is currently a Director of the Open Source Initiative, and serves as an advisor to CollabNet, Inc. and WhiteSource Software. He earned a Ph.D. in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a B.A. in mathematics and physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ACM. He was the 2012 recipient of the Distinguished Educator award from the IEEE Technical Council on Software Engineering, and the 2013 recipient of the Influential Educator Award from the ACM Special Interest Committee on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT).

The Challenges of Universal Connectivity

Modern smartphones present an array of technical, economic, and sociopolitical issues for governments, network operators, handset and device manufacturers, app developers, end users. These issues include such topics as bandwidth, spectrum, provisioning, device customization, app development tools and techniques, m-commerce, security, privacy, and more.
Developers of mobile apps can obtain access to a user’s identity, contacts, location, SMS, phone, and/or DeviceID. Access to this information enables apps to deliver an extensive amount of personal and location-specific content, including information about local news, weather, transportation, restaurants, cinemas, and activities. Taken together, all of these mobile phones, remote sensors, and wearable and embedded medical devices mean that virtually everyone in advanced societies is continuously connected to a wide range of service providers, embedded system manufacturers, apps, and personal contacts through the Internet, the telecom network, Bluetooth, and other mechanisms. Often, the users of these phones and devices are unaware of all of the active connections, even though they have given approval for their use in one way or another.
This talk summarizes major advantages and risks associated with the universal connectivity that is available with this technology.